The networked computing environment (e.g., cloud computing environment) is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further enhanced by one or more additional abstraction layers (e.g., a cloud layer), thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical computing engines, servers and devices, device memory, and storage devices, among others.
Clustering solutions are often utilized in large enterprise and “mission critical” applications that may have high performance and availability requirements. This may be achieved by having multiple servers for the purpose of load balancing, or by having redundant servers for the purpose of high availability. Currently available cluster management tools focus mainly on servers and Internet Protocol (IP) connectivity, and rely on shared network storage like Network Attached Storage (NAS), Storage Area Network (SAN), etc., for storage resiliency. Modern enterprise storage systems are typically complex and have many possible configurations. For end-to-end performance optimization and availability, the configuration of storage resources and interconnection fabric should be carefully planned. Impromptu configuration may lead to poor availability, deteriorated performance or higher cost. Challenges may exist, however, in that current approaches generally involve manual configuration by “experts” in the field. Such approaches may unintentionally introduce data path faults, but may also be time consuming and inefficient.